The Continuum

Everything is a continuum.
Everything is fundamentaly interconnected and interdependent.
Everything is a profound unity.
But from that profound unity, different energies and different ways they are patterned emerge.
Within these energies, vast and ageless inteligences and powers are manifest.
By truly accepting the nature of the world such as it is – a continuum – you are able to perceive and tap into these energies and their patterns.

Let’s take a closer look at humans as a continuum, and how they interact with what they perceive to be ”outside of” or ”apart from” themselves.

Every human needs a mother and a father to be born, or at least an egg and a sperm. This already makes the human being a part of ancient lineage of biological reproduction that goes back to unfathomably deep history, as every mother and father had their mother and father.

The human, gestating, born and growing, is inseparately part of conditions that exceed even this deep reproductive lineage. The development of the fetus is impacted by the mother’s health, which is in turn impacted by myriad enviromental, biological, emotional and so on reasons. The human is born into a society, shaped by deep networks and flows of materiality and culture.

It would take perhaps more than the written body of works ever produced by humanity to truly, completely even describe the conditions that shaped the place where the baby human was born. Consider briefly the modern hospital, how many different factors of science, education, industry and culture have had to converge together to produce something like that.

The young human learns from culture and conditioning, taking the patterns presented by their parents and society at large and either integrating or rejecting them. These patterns have in turn been patterned by larger patterns of culture and materiality. No matter the reaction, the growing human has to contend with various expectations arising from their surroundings, and needs and desires rising from their existence as an individuated biological being. Sometimes these two things clash quite strongly, and often it is the surrounding culture, the very deep patterns that tell humans how to be humans that win out.

But humans are more than just flesh and culture, there is something more intangible, broader, vaster that they too are inseparately part of, and that is the latent flows of inteligence and energy that constitute all of reality. An individual human is part of this cosmic consciousness with the capability to perceive itself as being apart of it. But this perception of the self apart from the continuum is not the whole story, and can in fact become quite the source of disconnection and pathological patterns.

As the grand flow of energy and consciousness that makes up all of existence changes it shapes, it is incarnated in various forms, which exist for a while, perish and move on. We all have been countless other things over the course of our existence, we may in fact very well be all of existence at some point, perhaps even all the time. But we simply cannot usually perceive reality in this manner.

Over the course of things-becoming-other things, the streams that make up the continuum start to pick up certain tendencies, and these tendencies can carry over from one perceived ”lifetime” to another. Just as we are not biologicaly or cultural blank slates, our consciousness, mindstream or ”soul” is not a blank slate either, and we arrive here usually with already quite the baggage.

As with how patterns in general act, they are subject to things like feedback loops, essentially certain features reinforcing themselves in an endless loop. For entities which taste embodiment, this can and often becomes a kind of karmic threadmill where life sinks deeper into life, and therefore deeper into death, and with it, endless permutation and variation of the same themes. We have all witnessed an unbelievably, aeons long struggle of separating the world into food and threats and mates and enemies and parents and friends and us and them. Life as we the embodied know it is beautiful, terrifying and addictive and hard to give up. But it’s also on some level fundamentally unsatisfying, agonizing, even hellish.

This is why so many traditional cosmologies tend downwards. Hell is a rampant feedback loop sucking the consciousness into a more and more confined frames, as we learn to defend our embodiments against predators, poisons, cold, heat, hunger, fear, shame, expectations, trauma, as we learn that going out, reaching out is being dangerous, being open invites exploitation and leads to threat of ostracization, each seemingly cognitively higher iteration simply giving more and more elaborate defensive structures to build against rest of the world. Hell might also be a discreet realm where a stream of consciousness so throughly warped by being stuck in this constant process of cutting itself to fit into smaller and smaller spaces eventually ends up, but for all relevant purposes, hell is also immanent in everything and everywhere.

This hell is often interpreted as being a kind of subterranean realm, because it has much to do with how humans experience their most ”hellish” qualities from the lower parts of the body. Biological reproduction is a complicated affair often rife with feelings of uncontrollable lust, tinged with shame and violence, either as a perpetrator or a victim. It’s also from our below where we excrete, and this too is often tinged with shame. Perhaps it’s an archaic reminder of times when humans were prey and we too had to concern ourselves with covering our excrement. It’s also in the lower body where we tend to first tense up when threats emerge, and the fight-or-flight response strongly activates the lower body systems. In this sense, the lower and hellish realms are not just immanent in reality at large, but also in the human body itself.

The world is not hopeless though, far from it. Just as these hellish qualities are present everywhere and constantly threaten to choke you out and keep your repeating this infinitively contracting loop, there are other patternings that are possible. It’s possible to instead shift yourself into a pattern that is expanding and tends towards what are archetypally considered the ”upper realms”. This reinforces the connection to the broader universe, starting from the ”little universe” of ourselves and the immediate surroundings, all the way to the big totality of The Continuum itself.

If the hellish spiral is one of life-collapsing-into-life untill the most agonizing aspects of life become dominant, the upwards spiral is not necessarily a rejection of life, but being able to rise above the obvious. It’s about being able to recognize the kind of loops you are stuck in and getting out of them. It’s about recognizing the deep interconnections you share with the world. It’s about having the bravery to unclench, to let go, to be open and vulnerable and having the strenght to survive that. It’s about seeing life as growth, of being open and curious. It’s about creating deep connections with the world around you and your history. Most of all, it’s about being able to tame our most instinctive parts, not by force, but by focus.

Focus is the tool that starts to open up The Continuum. When you become able to be still and observe without projecting even for a little while, things will start unfolding, first slowly, and then perhaps quite rapidly. Focus is your spotlight into reality, you truly perceive only what you pay attention to. There is a truly miraculous world out there which most simply chooese not to perceive, because the facilities for being able to very effectively tap into the subtler aspects of The Continuum are rarely born with. But even on a smaller scale, actually paying attention to how our bodies feel, what our emotions actually feel, what causes these sensations and what needs to be done differently to address them allready in itself will unlock incredible things. Realizing you are constantly tensed up and that the body and emotions are one and same thing and finally learning how to unclench yourself feels amazing. And if the body and emotions are one and the same, then what else is one and the same?

When you start being able to pay attention, really pay attention, incredible things will happen. When you start noticing the patterns, the patterns tend to notice you. This is the old ”when you take interest in the supernatural, the supernatural takes interest in you”. There are things so vast and deep and powerful out there it’s incomprehensible. And when you can tap into these patterns, you start to practice the perennial art of The Continuum.

It has been called by many different names. The root word for ”religion” comes from ”religio”, to bind again. Tantra, seidr and musubi all share similar meaning of binding things together. What is it then, that all these different people have been binding together throughout history? It’s about binding humans and what we could call gods and spirits. It’s also the binding together of people, culture and traditions in order to pass the ancient wisdom of humans and non-humans who have taken part in a particular lineage. It’s about binding students to teachers. It’s about binding back together something that has been wounded or lost.

But it’s also binding together seemingly disparate elements, binding the deep, vast patterns into representations through language and imagery, the making of the ”idola deus”. It’s about binding together the microcosm and macrocosm, the realms inside us with the realms outside of us, as much such a distinction can be made. It’s about binding together sound, visualization, movement into art of tapping into patterns of energy and changing them. It’s about binding together humans, time, space, and everything that lies outside of our usual categories. By binding and re-binding the world, the deep interconnections, maybe eventually even the unity of all being becomes visible. Along the way you might discover things that many would deem to have passed into fantasy. Fantasy too is part of this continuum, just a shadow of reality.

This binding of disparate elements can also include binding together elements we tend to deem unmixable, the hells and the heavens. We all already do that on some level. The straight spiral to hell is an exception, if such even happens at all. We all stumble between being in that downwards tending spiral and having moments where we open up and expand or do things differently, become inspired and change the path. The ”upwards” spiral is rarely direct either. The downwards tending features of life are rather persistent, and there are forces out there which would like to see humans be forever stuck on a downward trajectory. Most of these forces manifest in rather mundane ways, and the power of those who are less mundane should not be overstated. And for everything out there that would like to drag us down and cut us off, there are also those who would like to uplift us and help us reconnect with the world at large.

The same processes which can lead to a hellward path can also be used to power an opposite trajectory. In some sense it’s almost needed. The urgency and despair needed for course correction are reactions which if unlistened to could lead to apathy and exhaustion and deepening of old patterns. There is no energy in this universe that cannot be, if one is skillfull enough, harnessed for other purposes. Anger, resentment, hunger, desire, lust, all of these things can be transmuted, directed or manifested in different ways. The lower realms are full of energy, raw, powerful energy, and when one taps into it, it can be extremely empowering. But it can also wash you away, consume you.

As difficult as it might be, fighting and repressing might also ultimately be hell realm behaviors, as they create resistance, build blockages and obstructions and can lead to a deepening of patterns that cut you off from the world. It’s extremely necessary to cultivate the ability to let things pass through without clinging, rejecting or fighting it. Not every burst of energy needs to be reacted to. Sexual urges, irritations, pangs of sadness, these can be acknowledged and allowed to pass their course without need for particular action or reaction.

When one’s relationship with these energies and emotions begins to change and you fight them less and less, a kind of process of clarification begins that starts clearing out old patterns, allowing new ones to be built. This in time can become a great source of energy, which can then be directed by focus. By doing this you are able to counteract the biggest problem with the ”upper realms” as they are manifest in the world and immanent in the human being.

The upper realms are thin and immaterial. They can house great, vast inteligences which are profoundly wise and look at the world from a kind of bird’s eye view. They can also be very hard to reach and detached. Their bodies are religions and ideologies and cultures. These realms can also be baffling, abstract, incomprehensive and phantasmagoric. There is a lot of love and light there, but it’s not all love and light, and especially for the unprepared the upper realms can be confusing and terrifying. At the very upper end, they bleed out into the undivided reality. The upper realms are immanent in the world in the sense that ultimately everything is one, but they are also to be found in the universities and churches, company offices and government institutions – more often than not deeply intermingled with some very hellish qualities.

In humans, the upper realms are immanent in our head. It’s their presence that gifts us with more abstract forms of cognition that go beyond the most base survival instincts. It’s their presence that makes at least some of us wonder what’s beyond the night skies, or what is the purpose of life, or what truth and beauty means. Humans are so proud of their brains – perhaps rightfully so – that for many the brain really is all there is. The pathological upper realm orientation is one of excessive cerebrality, even escapism. A wildly untethered spirituality is also possible.

Some hold that it’s indeed in the middle where the magic – proverbial, maybe also literal – happens, at the heart center. It’s where the vision and insight and wisdom of the upper realms can meet up with the driving power of the lower realms, and through it, by aligning energy with a direction, real action can happen. By meeting onself at the center, really focus, one can be present in the undivided reality as it is manifest, and when one is present, the possibilites open up. And if one can bring the ”hell” and ”heaven”, both in reality one single continuum, to meet, then one can surely bring together things like sound, visualization, posture and purpose. There are things out there that can be aligned for incredible transformative power. And along the way such supernatural powers like letting people be wrong online and tolerating Zooms meetings might also emerge.

Am I yet any good at this ”Art of the The Continuum”?
No.
But it feels like I finally see the picture, the roadmap.
Just to be cautious though, I reserve myself the right to be completely wrong though.
It’s not like this is something I personally invented yesterday though.
It very much feels like all the legitimate traditions are circling a target that is something like this.
The Real Continuum, being the totality of existence, is impossible to describe anyway.

You can’t squeeze infinity into text.

…

So what does any of this have anything to do with Touhou? Maybe just a little, but for one, Touhou too is part of this continuum. ZUN likely didn’t inted it to be seen this way, but as it’s chock full of references to very real traditions which have in their own ways grappled with The Continuum, one can simply follow the references to their start. And by making these references, ZUN has practiced his own religio, his own seidr, his own tantra, his own musubi, and bound together unlikely elements.

A highly technological form of entertainment originally from the West, wholeheartedly adopted by the Japanese, used to reincarnate their rich mythology and tradition is at face value quite the unusual development. Yet it’s one that happened, and ZUN is of course not alone in what he has done. Perhaps Touhou’s greatest strenght is that it didn’t try too hard, dared to be idiosyncratic and allowed itself to manifest in it’s own terms, freely shared among those who enjoyed it. And along the way this musubi bridging time and space and man, machine and mythology became a huge phenomenon. Some say it was because of hentai doujins, and I say it’s because of soul, but most likely these two met in the middle and gave it a big heart. I would be telling a big lie if my interest in Touhou would be 100% free of libido.

While Touhou feels especially channeled, in some way anything that refers anything that can be traced back to a legitimate wisdom tradition can serve as a trail of breadcrumbs. So in that sense Touhou isn’t unique. Maybe there are other forms of popular entertainment that lit the fire for other people. But what Touhou has going on for is how it deals questions about the nature of the numinous and power of human belief into it’s worldbuilding, admitedly in ways that are explicitly not in line with how I feel about things. I don’t think it’s just our belief or attention, as much power as they have.

Touhou’s obsession with patterns, loops, liminalities, the return of things condemned to past and how it exists in a kind of mythological time are all features that are also present in certain ”supernatural” or numinous aspects of The Continuum. It’s this accidental insight, the head failing but heart succeeding, that I really think makes Touhou special to me.

And that focus? Well, it’s one thing you need to get anywhere with these games. I think ultimately it really was the fact that Touhou games were the first thing that really forced me to focus on something where all of this started spooling out for me. From there on out this focus has then moved into whole new domains of life. I’ve also come to apreciate how the focus dot in the games sits roughly at the heart center – a kind of obvious placement, yes, but perhaps a good, constant reminder for us all.

So is Touhou good practice for this Art of The Continuum, which might be what that religio+n might really be all about? Well, in the broader picture, no. I would strongly urge you to take up meditating and explore things like qigong yoga, tantra and shamanism untill you find things that are resonant with you. I would also urge you to explore nature or at least get in touch with the Sun. For me, one of the turning points that caused me to write this thing in a single sitting was realizing how to tap into the power of the sun. It’s so simple. You just go outside, and with your eyes closed, you look towards it and let it’s power into you. You can protest that it’s mundane, but the point is, the mundane and numinous are constantly immanent in each other.

What Touhou however has going for it is it’s rich mythological tapestry and gameplay that forces total focus and brings you face to face with modern representations of vast, ancient forces. It’s a very peculiar little techno-ritual, but in the prevailing conditions, some very unusual looking and feeling ties might have to be weaved in that weave, that religio, that seidr, that tantra, that musubi. For those with the eyes to see, Touhou, like all of reality, can become something far more richer and profound. And for those who don’t want to or can’t to open them, the wondrous goes unnoticed, just as it goes in general in life. All the ten realms and everything in between is right here, right now, everywhere, on the other side of a single breath.